The June 30 search in Hamden was not the first time a public agency had reason to look at the Siders children. Gallia County Children Services, in the next county over, took the family to juvenile court twice before anyone in Vinton County opened the door on Ohmer Street. Court records released in August show nine dependency complaints filed in March 2020. The agency alleged that one child had entered Ohio Virtual Academy in late 2019 with no prior schooling and with significant developmental delays. Caseworkers documented roaches, flies and gnats, elevated lead levels, and missed medical follow-up. The court ordered protective supervision beginning in early 2021. By May 2021 that supervision had been terminated. The family moved.

The same year, school officials in Gallia County filed habitual-truancy complaints. Six of the children were accused of missing Addaville Elementary. In October 2021 a deputy went to the family’s Cheshire address to serve the paperwork and found the house vacant. The truancy cases were terminated in January 2022 because the parents could not be served. A Gallia juvenile-court representative later said the school had made contact with a district in West Virginia where the family was believed to be living, and that the family moved again before authorities could act. Birth certificates and address records reviewed by the Columbus Dispatch trace a household that shifted across southern Ohio and into West Virginia over nearly two decades, with Elizabeth pregnant for much of the period since 2008. Fifteen of the sixteen children were born in Ohio hospitals, so the births were not hidden from the vital-records system. What the paper trail did not do was keep a caseworker, a truancy officer or a school attached to the children once the family left a county.

In Vinton County the gap was total. The Vinton County Local School District told 10TV that the children were not enrolled and that the district had no information indicating they were homeschooled. Neighbors said they had not seen the children. Sheriff Cain said the children appeared to have spent most of four years in one twelve-by-twelve space. When officers arrived on June 30 they were not following a Vinton County children-services referral about that room. They were executing a search warrant for Gary Jr.’s DNA in a Sєx-abuse investigation. The children became visible because a different case put agents in the doorway. State lawmakers asked, in the weeks after, how a household that large could sit inside a village without a school record. State Representative Dontavius Jarrells and others raised the old questions about home visits after birth, pediatric checkups, and whether children services is funded to follow a family that moves. The Ohio Department of Children and Youth opened a review of how the county public children services agency followed federal and state requirements. That review is about practice. It is not a finding that any single worker failed, and it is not a finding that the 2020 cases should have produced a removal.

The record that does exist cuts both ways. Gallia County got to court, got protective supervision, and then ended it. The truancy cases died when service failed. The family was gone before the next county inherited a file. Vinton County, one of the poorest in Ohio, is now paying an estimated $200 a day for each of the sixteen children in foster care, six of them twins aged four or younger, a burn rate the Guardian reported as roughly the size of the local children-services budget problem. The children are in therapeutic placements and medical care. The adults are in the criminal courts, except Gary Sr., whom a judge found incompetent and not restorable on September 9 after prosecutor William Archer did not object. Christina is waiting on a dementia evaluation. Gary Jr. and Elizabeth face the endangerment indictment and the separate Sєx counts. None of that rewrites the earlier chapter. Two investigations reached this family. Neither removed the children. The district where they were finally found had no school record that they were there at all.